INTERNATIONAL LAWYERS URGE PH PEACE TALKS IN FOREIGN COUNTRY

A global orgnization of human rights lawyers joined calls for the resumption of peace negotiations between the Philippine government and the underground national liberation movement in the country.

Members of the governing Bureau of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL) who just concluded its two-day meeting in Brussels passed a resolution “urging the GRP and the NDFP to honor and abide by their agreements and resume their peace negotiations in a foreign neutral venue in order to try to resolve the basic issues of the Philippine armed conflict so that the Filipino people can attain a just and stable peace.”

The lawyers from 17 countries in 6 continents attending the biannual meeting said that they were “informed that the Philippine government is again persistently demanding that the peace negotiations be held in Manila, a position divergent from a binding agreement between the parties that it be held in a foreign neutral venue.”

The lawyers were alluding particularly to the GRP-NDFP Joint Agreement on Security and Immunity Guarantees (JASIG) the parties signed in 1995.

The progressive lawyers from Algeria, Belgium, Brazil, Greece, Iraq, Italy, Japan, Jordan, Kuwait, Palestine, Philippines, Portugal, United Kingdom, United States, South Africa and Togo pointed out that “mainly for security reasons, history and universal practice teach us that most, if not all, peace negotiations between two warring parties were generally held in a foreign neutral venue outside the country or territories where their respective armed forces are.”

They shared their views on the experience of peace negotiations in Colombia, Ireland, Palestine, and South Africa, among others.

The IADL, which has consultative status with the United Nations, was founded in 1946 in Paris and has members also in Austria, Bangladesh, Bulgaria, Cameroon, Cuba, France, Germany, Haiti, India, Indonesia, Lebanon, South Korea, North Korea, Nepal, Pakistan, Puerto Rico. Spain, Turkey, and Vietnam.

Its founders and leaders were part of the drafting of th 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Nuremberg trials and the anti-apartheid movement.

IADL lawyers have helped to establish fundamental concepts of international and domestic law including the provision of prisoner of war status to combatants from liberation movements and the recognized legal right of peoples to self-determination.